Overcoming uncertainty : Moscow merchants’ wealth and inheritance in the second half of the nineteenth century

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Overcoming uncertainty:

Moscow merchants’ wealth and inheritance in

the second half of the nineteenth century.

Olga Pavlenko

Thesis submitted for assessment with a view to

obtaining the degree of Doctor of History and Civilization of the European University Institute

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European University Institute

Department of History and Civilization

Overcoming uncertainty:

Moscow merchants’ wealth and inheritance in the second half of the

nineteenth century.

Olga Pavlenko

Thesis submitted for assessment with a view to

obtaining the degree of Doctor of History and Civilization of the European University Institute

Examining Board

Prof. Youssef Cassis, EUI, Supervisor

Prof. Andrei Markevich, NES, Moscow, External Advisor Prof. Alexander Etkind, EUI

Prof. Tracy Dennison, Caltech

No part of this thesis may be copied, reproduced or transmitted without prior permission of the author

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Researcher declaration to accompany the submission of written work Department of History and Civilization - Doctoral Programme

I Olga Pavlenko certify that I am the author of the work Overcoming uncertainty: Moscow merchants’ wealth and inheritance in the second half of the nineteenth century.

I have presented for examination for the Ph.D. at the European University Institute. I also certify that this is solely my own original work, other than where I have clearly indicated, in this declaration and in the thesis, that it is the work of others.

I warrant that I have obtained all the permissions required for using any material from other copyrighted publications.

I certify that this work complies with the Code of Ethics in Academic Research issued by the European University Institute (IUE 332/2/10 (CA 297).

The copyright of this work rests with its author. Quotation from it is permitted, provided that full acknowledgement is made. This work may not be reproduced without my prior written consent. This authorisation does not, to the best of my knowledge, infringe the rights of any third party.

I declare that this work consists of 129 820 words.

Statement of language correction:

This thesis has been corrected for linguistic and stylistic errors. I certify that I have checked and approved all language corrections, and that these have not affected the content of this work.

Signature and date: 07.05.2020

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Abstract

In recent years, there has been an explosion of literature about material inequality and the historical linkages between socio-economic disparities and inheritance strategies. These studies mainly focus on Western Europe and North America, while histories of personal wealth in the Russian Empire are underrepresented.

My dissertation investigates the role of social stratification and private property rights in the accumulation and redistribution of personal wealth among the Russian urban population. I particularly focus on guild merchants during the second half of the nineteenth century. I have examined this group because merchants straddled social estates (as defined by law), class (as defined by socio-economic activity) and most were successful in the accumulation of personal assets.

In investigating the membership books of Moscow guild merchants, last wills, inheritance valuations, wardships, and other sources, I show that guild merchants successfully managed low social and economic appreciation of mercantile agency imposed by the authorities and were able to accumulate wealth. The moderate, yet stable, number of guild merchants was the result of a fledgling internal market rather than ineffective business practices. The proportion of transmitted inheritances to the Gross National Product was low (4 percent), which suggests that inheritances benefitted the lives of urban Muscovites, but only moderately. The social inequality of wealth distribution was high (150 times between honorary citizens and artisans in Moscow in 1892), though between 1888 and 1908 the number of testators in the Russian Empire increased two times and value of transmitted inheritances increased by 12 percent. Excluding guild merchants, the rest of the urban population preferred single universal inheritance transmission. Guild merchants, however, chose more egalitarian, gender-neutral bequeathing patterns which lowered successor’s future income uncertainty.

The variations and shifts in bequeathing patterns suggest that the less egalitarian inheritance strategies (embraced by the majority of the urban population) were balanced by higher value inheritances among guild merchants which applied more egalitarian inheritance strategies. As a result, the level of material inequality was likely moderate in comparison to other countries, and the urban population was less destitute than previously described in other studies. Thus, my research contributes to the existing literature by providing empirical evidence and accurate estimations of the levels of personal wealth along social and geographic lines in late Imperial Russia.

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List of abbreviations

Ezhegodnik Ministerstva Finansov – EMF

Sbornik statisticheskikh svedenii Ministerstva Iustitsii – sb. stat. sved. MIu Polnyi Svod Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii – SZRI

Polnoe Sobranie Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii – PSZRI

Tsentralnyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Moskvy, Otdel khraneniia do 1917 – TsGA Moskvy OKhD do 1917

Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv – RGIA

Otdel rukopisei pri Gosudarstvennom Istoricheskom Muzee – OR GIM

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List of Tables

Table 1. 1 The proportion of Muscovite to non-Muscovite guild members in Moscow merchant guilds, 1865-1898 ... 57 Table 1. 2 The number of patents, guild merchant soslovie members and businesses in the context of the urban population (Russian Empire, 1840 and 1897) ... 62 Table 1. 3 The number of Moscow guild merchants with enrolled in relatives, in thousand ... 64 Table 1. 4 The number of annual bankruptcy boards in the Russian commercial courts*, 1885-1898 65 Table 1. 5 The number of bankruptcy petitions in district courts (civil cases) in the internal provinces of the Russian Empire, 1885-1897 ... 67 Table 1. 6 The business or occupational guild membership succession by family or kin relatives among the Moscow guild merchantry in 1879 and 1897 ... 69 Table 1. 7 The average number of years a guild merchant continuously purchased merchant guild patents in 1879 and 1897 in Moscow... 70 Table 1. 8 The average age of Moscow guild merchants (patent holders) in 1879 and 1897, by sex .. 71

Table 2. 1 Population by county and age-groups (per 1,000), around 1912 ... 75 Table 2. 2 Moscow Population by Age Groups (1871-19 12) per 1,000 people ... 76 Table 2. 3 Distribution of Moscow population by age and soslovie, 1902, in percent ... 77 Table 2. 4 Average longevity of life among of merchant soslovie members, Central Black Earth Region, 1781-1825 ... 91 Table 2. 5 Average mortality in Urban and Rural areas in the Russian Empire (per 1000) ... 92 Table 2. 6 The average longevity of life of philanthropists and their relatives, 1704-1896 year of birth, Moscow ... 95 Table 2. 7 Average longevity of life by Birth Cohorts for Philanthropist and their Relatives, Moscow ... 96 Table 2. 8 Life expectancy at age 15 for philanthropists and their relatives, Moscow ... 97 Table 2. 9 Life expectancy at age 45 for philanthropists and their relatives, Moscow ... 98 Table 2. 10 Life expectancy for philanthropists with relatives and academics at age 50 by gender and calendar periods, 1720-1899 ... 99 Table 2. 11 Average longevity of life of Moscow philanthropists by the sum of their donations and gender ... 100 Table 2. 12 Average longevity of life of Moscow merchants by calendar period of birth (without philanthropists and their relatives) ... 101 Table 2. 13 Average longevity of life of the combined sample of Moscow merchant philanthropists and relatives with Moscow merchants ... 101 Table 2. 14 Average longevity of life for Orthodox and Old Believer philanthropists, 1704-1896 ... 103

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Table 2. 15 Moscow merchant family demography, 1863-1910 ... 117 Table 2. 16 Family members by age (median) and marital and cohabitation status, 1863, 1881,1897 ... 119 Table 2. 17 The number and percentage proportion (in parenthesis) of sons and daughters to the total number of family members enrolled in merchant certificates in Moscow, 1863-1910 ... 120 Table 2. 18 The number of merchant sons (stepsons and male adopted children included) enrolled on certificates as the head of the family, by age groups, in Moscow, 1897... 120 Table 2. 19 The structure of merchant families by the age of the head of the family, the number of male relatives enrolled on a single certificate in Moscow, 1879, by guilds ... 122 Table 2. 20 The average age of Moscow guild merchants by sex and guild, 1879, 1897... 130 Table 2. 21 The proportion of male and female merchant heads of family by age groups in Moscow, 1879 and 1897 ... 131

Table 3. 1 Relations between the number of Muscovites by soslovie in 1882 and the proportions of the number of real estate owners, the number of properties in private ownership and the value of extracted net income in 1892 ... 148

Table 4. 1 The ratio of deceased individuals over the age of 20 to the number of submitted confirmation requests for inheritance, inner provinces, 1885-1908 ... 178 Table 4. 2 Will-making practices by socio-occupational groups and the gender of testators in Moscow, 1885-1917 ... 179 Table 4. 3 The average value and number of transmitted inheritances in the Russian Empire, 1900-1905 ... 181 Table 4. 4 Ratio of potential Income taxpayers, 1900-1904 ... 182 Table 4. 5 The annual average value and number of transmitted inheritances (above 1,000 roubles) by regions of the Russian Empire, 1888-1890 ... 183 Table 4. 6 The distribution of wards by type and value of personal assets in the social estates in Moscow, 1892 ... 185 Table 4. 7 The value and number of gifts inter vivos confirmed by senior notaries in 1884-1914, in European Russia, excluding Warsaw (in millions of roubles) ... 189 Table 4. 8 The average value per single gift in European Russia, excluding Warsaw, 1884-1914 (in roubles) ... 190 Table 4. 9 The fraction of gifts inter vivos transmitted in Moscow and Saint Petersburg* to the total value of gifts transmitted in European Russia, excluding Warsaw ... 191 Table 4. 10 The composition and evaluation of personal assets possessed by Muscovites in the second half of the XIX century by type of property (in roubles) * ... 194

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Table 4. 11 Distribution of bank deposits by depositor’s occupation and value of deposits in the Russian Empire, in 1913 ... 207

Table 5. 1 Number of wills and recipients, Moscow the eighteenth and the long -nineteenth century ... 248 Table 5. 2 Proportion of wills with different patterns of bequeathing ... 250 Table 5. 3 Proportions of bequeathing patterns among social estates of the urban population (in %) 251 Table 5. 4 Proportion of last wills in which different types of recipients appeared ... 251 Table 5. 5 The value of property transmitted to charity through the State Treasury, charitable and education establishments, churches, monasteries in the entire Russian Empire, 1900-1906 ... 261 Table 5. 6 Patterns of business transmission in the eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries, in absolute numbers ... 263 Table 5. 7 Patterns of real estate transmission in the eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries, in absolute numbers ... 265 Table 5. 8 Patterns of liquid assets and personalty transmission in the eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries, in absolute numbers ... 267

List of Figures

Figure 1. 1 Number of purchased guild merchant patents (without enrolled family members) in the Russian Empire, 1816-1912 ... 58 Figure 1. 2 The number of merchant guild certificates purchased in Central Russia, 1831-1911 ... 59

List of Tables in Appendix

Appendix 1 Russian merchantile agency, 1816-1912 ... 286 Appendix 2 Number of Moscow guild merchants, 1865-1910 ... 290

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Introduction

This dissertation examines the connections between occupational uncertainty, wealth accumulation and its management by Moscow guild merchants in the second half of the nineteenth century. I analyse last wills, wardship cases, numerous quantitative prosopographical sources, official statistics and demographic data. Using these sources, I investigate how guild merchants’ personal micro-level decision-making about the size and structure of families, occupation, decisions about wealth accumulation and investment, and inheritance practices influenced national-level economic development and vice versa. In particular, I question whether inheritance strategies and patterns of bequests influenced wealth inequality and economic growth in the Russian Empire. Similarly, I examine whether Russia was unique in this regard and if these patterns differed from other European countries.

There is a long-established scholarly tradition of faulting Russian merchants for low occupational reproduction, instability and risk-averse behaviour. These arguments blame Russian merchants for their general inability to produce an analogue of the European middle class (i.e. the accumulation of a substantial proportion of wealth) and their failure to foster liberal movements which would or should have prevented the collapse of the Russian Empire. I call these assertions the merchant myth. I argue that, when challenged by new data, the merchant myth appeared to be based mainly on scholars’ intuitive preconceptions and ideological constructs, which do not reflect the reality of nineteenth century merchant behaviour. The spectre of serfdom constrained the development of an internal market and also challenged the healthy development of a distinct group of full-time businessmen (as opposed to part-time, seasonal peasant traders). Nevertheless, I argue that guild merchants successfully balanced the uncertainty of their status and the limitations placed on their property rights in this hostile economic environment.

The Russian business community in the second half of the nineteenth century (including all mercantile and entrepreneurial agents), and especially Moscow guild merchants, are at the centre of my research. I focus on guild merchants because this legal social estate was officially defined and can be traced easily in official statistics. Also, guild merchants were likewise involved in profit-extracting occupations which meant that members likely owned wealth. Contrary to the Russian-Soviet tradition of applying the murky European concepts of the “bourgeoisie” or middle class to Russian merchants, I largely leave the discussion of these

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concepts to other researchers.1_{While I include some speculations about the similarities and}

differences between Russian and European merchants, these assertions are peripheral to the main aim of my research: I do not aim to provide a comprehensive framework for analysing Russian guild merchants as part of the middle class or bourgeoisie. On the contrary, I aim to analyse the impact of their occupation and legal social status on personal life cycles and wealth management.

My first objective is to examine whether the discrepancy between the legal (soslovie or estate membership) and economic statuses of the members of the Russian business community posed a general obstacle to labour mobility, personal assets accumulation and economic growth. In other words, I examine the effectiveness of soslovie membership as it relates to occupational mobility and wealth accumulation. Legislation on mercantile agency in the Russian Empire was flexible. It provided individuals who were seeking extra income or full-time occupations with a variety of opportunities in trade, production and service. Official membership in the guild merchant soslovie depended on the annual purchase of a merchant (soslovie) patent, which was mandatory between 1824 and 1898.2_{The guild patents provided}

holders and their family members with legal, social and economic privileges. Peasant and meshchane (towns people) trade did not require a patent because this mercantile activity was lower in profitability. Without a patent, however, these mercantile agents did not receive additional social and economic privileges.

Russian history provides multiple examples of legal attempts to balance the fiscal needs of the Russian State with a social order that would successfully define subjects vis a vis state (estate society) and occupational status (class society) or ethnic status. Scholars agree that the social tissue of the Russian state was fragmentary which on the one hand, allowed to introduce new social estates endlessly, however, on the other hand, the social categories were always chaotic, and many people were left unattached to any social estate.3_{History shows that the}

majority of attempts at mercantile social reforms, when viewed in the context of inherited shortages of bureaucratic apparatuses, low urbanisation, and the vast geographic areas populated by numerous specific social groups, were not successful. The paradox, however, is that loosely regulated connections between the occupational and social legal statuses (here, the

1 Petrov, Iu. A., Moskovskaia burzhuaziia v nachale XX veka: predprinimatelstvo i politika (Moskva, 2002), p. 4.

2 Before 1824 there was another system of enrolment in the soslovie.

3 Etkind, A.M., Vnutrenniaia kolonizatsiia. Imperskii opyt Rossii. (Moskva, 2013), p. 159; Wirtschafter, E. K., Social Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, 1997), p. 8; Freeze, G. L., ‘The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social History’, The American Historical Review, 91, 1 (1986), pp. 11–36.

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guild merchantry) in the Russian Empire show little evidence that merchants were hampered by an imbalance of supply and demand in the internal market. On the contrary, data on the evolution of the number of guild merchants and the business-related population shows that the community increased proportionally to the increase of the urban population throughout the nineteenth century and was balanced by the demands of the internal market. My argument is supported by evidence which shows that the abolition serfdom (1861), the annulment of the third merchant guild (1863), and the reduction and later abolition of redemption payments (1881 and 1907) did not substantially alter the behaviour and evolution of guild merchants or the business community in general. My data shows that both groups grew moderately throughout the nineteenth century. Similarly, I argue that, in the context of the institutional framework of serfdom and the extended agricultural specialisation of Russian population, scholars cannot simply limit the number of mercantile agents to professional full-time guild merchants. The omission of trading peasants, small-scale producers and retailers from analysis runs the risk of distorting interpretations of the role and significance of Russian mercantile agency.

What distinguishes my work from previous studies of this nature is my focus on the broader perspective and my incorporation of new sources. I consistently contextualise the Moscow business community and guild merchants, which I compare to mercantile agents across Russia and to the non-business-related population. I also combine impersonal statistics with individual events in the life cycle of families and suggest that marriage, birth, death and occupational mobility in different groups influenced the evolution of soslovie and the business community (and vice versa). I question how soslovie legal regulations affected demographic and occupational behaviour of guild merchants. Additionally, I ask whether wealth in the nineteenth century affected mortality and if the family and personal livelihoods of Moscow merchants were influenced by occupational uncertainty and “status stress” (membership was not hereditary and depended on annual patent purchases). What were the differences in personal strategies, demographic behaviour and property management patterns between members of the first and the second guilds other than the value and extent of trade and production? Another novel feature of my work is that it is the first attempt to calculate gender-specific life expectancy data on Moscow guild merchants. I do so in order to investigate whether demographic transition and the general influence of wealth on life expectancy is relevant to nineteenth century Russian society. While these trends have been explored in other European countries, they have never been examined in the Russian context for an extended geographical area and chronological period.

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What emerges from my analysis of published and unpublished sources on the occupational and demographic evolution of the Russian business community, is that the trajectory of the Russian guild merchantry substantially mirrored the evolution of European mercantile institutions (by stages and types of agency, not by state-merchant relationships). At some chronological points, however, the general trend of the evolution of the guild merchantry diverged and converged, influenced by regional political and economic specificity. As in Europe, Russian mercantile institutions went through several stages of evolution. Individual agency was replaced by associations of mercantile agents: in Europe by guilds and in Russia by the sto (a Russian guild-like mercantile institution). Later guild-like institutions were replaced by family firms which by the mid to late nineteenth century, were replaced by (global) corporations and public companies run by external managers. It is commonly argued that the juxtaposition of the guild merchantry as both an economic and a separate legal social institution was detrimental to the development of a sophisticated merchant class. But this explanation seems to be motivated by a misinterpretation of the evolution of the number and internal composition of the group. Adjusted and placed in context, data suggests that there were positive aspects to the evolution of Russian mercantile institutions, and Russian merchants behaved much the same as their European counterparts. In the face of occupational uncertainty, Russian merchants developed strategies to cope with risk and economic fluctuation that closely resembled those used by European agents, particularly family planning and the development of safety nets which consisted of kin members and friends.4_{My data calculations suggest that}

wealth levels were an important precondition when considering business survival and family strategy.

The second objective of my research is to explore how wealthy the Russian population, particularly the urban population, was on the eve of the 1917 Revolutions. How many wealthy people were there in the Russian Empire and how unequally were they distributed along social and geographical lines? The main limitation of all contemporary research on pre-revolutionary material inequality and living standards is a paucity of data. The few scholars who have published research on the topic usually use (1) two pre-revolutionary national-level surveys which estimated personal income over 1,000 roubles and provide fragmentary data on the value of individual income from some (but not all) sources, (2) anthropometrical data, (3) data on tax

4 For a detailed discussion of family and business strategies see, for example, Morris, R. J., Men, Women,

and Property in England, 1780-1870. A Social and Economic History of Family Strategies amongst the Leeds Middle Classes (Cambridge, 2005).

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collection, (4) demographic data etc. Each of these approaches, unfortunately, are flawed and lack specific details.5_{In suggesting that the level of income inequality at the eve of revolution}

was moderate in comparison to other counties, scholars limited their observations to general overviews of phenomena. As a result, they cannot provide detailed specifications about the social and economic characteristics of the Russian population as a whole.6

Apart from income, wealth is another means of understanding the level of material inequality and living standards prior to the Russian Revolutions. To date, no academic can provide information on how many Russians were able to save extra income (other than data on the number and value of saving accounts in banks) nor can they explain which strategies allowed for these savings. Similarly, they cannot explain how individuals combined different sources of income and which assets they preferred to accumulate. Previous academic studies cannot account for how the level and composition of personal wealth was connected to social stratification or to the level of wealth inequality in pre-revolutionary Russia. They also cannot explain the gaps between the average wealth of members of different social and professional groups as, for example, guild merchants and artisans. This gap seriously influences our understanding of the effects of industrialisation on personal well-being (both material and physical) and also limits our understanding of State-society relationships on the eve of revolution. Debates about the material causes of the 1917 February Revolution mainly centre around the material well-being of the rural population, without thoroughly investigating the material assets of the urban population. This is not only the result of ideological posturing, but also a lack of readily available data.

Numerous Western studies on this topic suggest that inheritance probations, the valuation of gifts inter vivos and wardship cases are the best sources to investigate the wealth of the

5 (1) Prokopovich, S.N., Opyt ischisleniia narodnogo dokhoda 50 gubernii Evropeiskoi Rossii v 1900-1913 (Moskva, 1918); Opyt priblizitelnogo ischisleniia narodnogo dokhoda po raznym ego istochnikam i po

razmeram v Rossii. materialy po proektu Polozheniia o gosudarstvennom podokhodnom naloge (SPb,

1906); Podokhodnyi nalog. Ozhidaemoe chislo platelshchikov, ikh dokhod i summa naloga, po

issledovaniiu, proizvedennomu poddatnymi inspektorami i kazennymi palatami v 1909-1910 (SPb, 1910).

(2) Nafziger, S. and Lindert, P., ‘Russian Inequality on the Eve of Revolution’, The Journal of Economic

History, 74, 3 (2014), pp. 767–797; Leonard, C. and Ljungberg, J., ‘Population and Living Standards,

1870-1914’, in Broadberry, S. N. and O'Rourke, K. H. (ed.), The Cambridge Economic History of Modern

Europe. 1870 to the Present. The Cambridge economic history of modern Europe, vol. 2, Cambridge, 2010,

pp. 108–129. (3) Mironov, B. N., The Standard of Living and Revolutions in Russia, 1700-1917. Routledge

Explorations in Economic History, vol. 55 (New York, NY, 2012). (4) Kahan, A. and Weiss, R., Russian Economic History. The nineteenth century (Chicago, 1989). (5) Hoch, S. L., ‘The Serf Economy, the

Peasant Family, and the Social Order’, in Burbank, J. and Ransel, D. L. (ed.), Imperial Russia. New

Histories for the Empire, Bloomington, 1998, pp. 199–209.

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deceased, which serve as a sufficient proxy for the value of their wealth while alive.7_These

sources, contrary to the national surveys, open up individual perspectives and present sufficiently specified data on personal wealth. What is more important, and again contrary to national surveys and officially gathered statistics on taxes, arrears and population movement, is that inheritance probations and sources of this kind usually do not change in internal composition and authenticity of valuations over time.

An analysis of official, though unpublished, estimations of the value of personal wealth transferred through inheritance shows that between 1885 and 1905, the proportion of wealth transferred through inheritance (gifts inter vivos included) was only 4 percent of the Gross National Product (GNP) in Russia (for comparison, in France at the end of the nineteenth century it was 25 percent, 21 percent in Britain and 16 percent in Germany). The proportion of deceased adults who left inheritances of any value, however, increased between these dates, from 13 to 22 percent. The proportion of gifts inter vivos to the value of transmitted inheritances also increased twofold. The broad implication of these findings is that contrary to the widely accepted preconception of a poor, pauperized Russian population from the seventeenth century to the Revolutions (supported mainly by pre-Soviet and Soviet scholars with regards to the Russian population in general), I suggest that there was, in addition to a thin layer of wealthy entrepreneurs, a larger group of the population who benefited from economic growth.8_{The benefit (here, wealth) was, however, distributed very unequally along both social}

and geographical lines. Inheritances were concentrated in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. The two capital cities accounted for 42 percent of transmitted inheritances in value and 20 percent in number (on average between 1888-1890). The average value of the wealth of Moscow guild merchants was 20 times higher than the average wealth of Moscow town-dwellers (meshchanin) and 100 times higher than average wealth of Moscow artisans. The huge gap

7 For example, Ohlsson, H., Roine, J. and Waldenström, D., ‘Inherited Wealth over the Path of Development: Sweden, 1810–2016’, Journal of the European Economic Association, (forthcoming) (2018); Alvaredo, F., Garbinti, B. and Piketty, T., ‘On the Share of Inheritance in Aggregate Wealth: Europe and the USA, 1900–2010’, Economica, 84, 334 (2017), pp. 239–260; Menchik, Paul L. and Jianakoplos, Nancy J., ‘Economics of Inheritance’, in Miller, R. K. and McNamee, S. J. (ed.), Inheritance and Wealth in America, New York, 2013, pp. 45–60; Miller, R. K. and McNamee, S. J., Inheritance and Wealth in America (New York, 2013); Durães, M., The Transmission of Well-Being. Gendered Marriage Strategies and Inheritance

Systems in Europe (17th-20th centuries) (Bern, New York, 2009); Stobart, J. and Owens, A., Urban Fortunes. Property and Inheritance in the Town, 1700-1900 (Aldershot, Burlington, 2000); Alfani, G. and

Di Tullio, M., The Lion's Share. Inequality and the Rise of the Fiscal State in Preindustrial Europe.

Cambridge studies in economic history (Cambridge, United Kingdom, 2019). For more examples, see

chapter 5 of this thesis on wealth transmission.

8 See a further discussion about the existing historiography in Kotsonis, Ia., Kak krestian delali otstalymi:

selskokhoziaistvennaia kooperatsiia i i agrarnyi vopros v Rossii 1861-1914 (Moskva, 2006); Mironov, B.

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between the average value of wealth among the social groups of urban population, however, does not automatically imply a dangerously revolutionary level of wealth inequality. Income is more important than wealth to maintaining lifestyles. The wage of educated professionals (medical practitioners or lawyers, for example) at the beginning of the twentieth century, was only 4 to 5 times higher than industrial labourers’ wages.9

I suggest that inequality in wealth distribution is not only about the proportion of the poor to the wealthy or the daily consumed quality and quantity of calories. Instead, it relates to which proportion of the population expected a comfortable life, and how this related to real opportunities. For example, in 1883 Moscow merchant Aleksandrr V. Kniazev wrote to his newly-married wife from the Novgorod trade fair. He described and valued his desired level of comfort: a spacious and bright apartment, muslin curtains, a marble washbasin, a large and elegant French bed, and glamorous mirrors. To this particular merchant, to live without numerous household items (spoons, plates, kitchen linen, etc. valued at 200 roubles) was a matter of life and death. Without them the couple would live like “dirty pigs”.10_Moscow

merchant widow Varakina Praskovia suggested in 1883 that an annual net income of 2,000 roubles would provide her and her two underage daughters with a comfortable life.11_{Ideally, a}

study about the value of wealth versus expectations would require individual-level evidence about what constituted a “comfortable life” and what annual income this life required. This was, however, outside the primary focus of my research. Instead, I approached the question of material inequality from the perspective of the role of income and wealth generating institutions of inheritance in Russia.

The third objective of this dissertation was to question the effectiveness of the institution of private property in the Russian Empire, with special focus on the role of inheritance transfers in the redistribution of parental wealth. Similarly, I examine the role of inheritance in the creation of favourable conditions for increasing inheritors’ income opportunities, and the role of inheritance in decreasing levels of uncertainty in the next generation.

I understand the effectiveness of the institution of private property within the framework of institutional economics. This framework refers to a number of economically relevant concepts, two of which are most applicable to my research. The first concept is the way well-defined

9 Mironov, B. N., ‘Kakaia doroga vedet k revoliutsii? Imushchestvennoe neravenstvo v Rossii za tri stoletiia, XVIII- nachalo XXI. (statia pervaia)’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, 8 (2014), pp. 96–104, p. 103. 10 Semeinaia perepiska kuptsov Kniazevykh (1883-1892). F. 440, Op. 1, D. 803, L. 1 ob-2.

11 Delo ob uchrezhdenii opeki nad detmi umershego kuptsa Varakina F.M. (1874). F. 83, Op. 2, D. 157, L. 128-129.

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ownership structures influence the distribution of wealth and consumption. The second is whether property rights allow, or to what extent limit, intergenerational property transfers.12

Thus, if classical economists understood property rights as a way to exclude some individuals from extracting profit from assets, the approach of institutional economics refers to private property rights as a set of rules which appeared from individual answers to official legislation, or the lack thereof. The effective institution of private property rights allows individuals to invest, control and transfer assets. The Russian Empire, however, never overcame the feudal, land-oriented character of personal property, and personal rights as the basis of property rights were never legally spread to the whole of the Russian population. The exception to this rule was the nobility, but even their rights were limited when it came to intergenerational property transfers. If limited and underregulated policies towards private property rights have previously been described as ineffective, data on the increased number of wealth holders and the value of transmitted wealth casts doubt on this conclusion. The data shows that the institutional approach, rather than an investigation of the issue through legal regulations, was probably most effective. By analysing a sample of last wills, I aim to reconstruct personal responses to State initiatives and suggest an institutional framework of private property rights in the Russian Empire (particularly in Moscow in the second half of the nineteenth century).

The implications of these findings go far beyond individual-level decision-making and influences on inheritors’ fate. I investigate the inheritance strategies of 419 testators and the shares of more than 1,500 inheritors spread across chronological (eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries) and social lines of the Moscow population. In consulting these sources, I establish patterns of wealth management (transmission) and show how these patterns evolved over two centuries. I look at two issues of succession. First, the way assets were partitioned: simple universal, partible, impartible. Second, I examine the type of assets (business, real estate, personalty and capital) transferred to different inheritors (sons, daughters, spouses, or others). In investigating these two aspects of property management, I aim to show whether occupational uncertainty (here, guild merchantry membership) influenced wealth accumulation and its redistribution. I also seek to understand whether inheritance strategies in Russia were as inequality-generating as in Europe, especially in the context of more relaxed constraints on the property management of Russian women. The data on the proportion of Russian rentiers by

12 Besley, T. and Ghatak, M., ‘Property Rights and Economic Development’, in Chenery, H. B., Srinivasan, T. N. and Behrman, J. R. (ed.), Handbook of Development Economics. Handbooks in economics, vol. 9, Amsterdam, 2005, pp. 4526–4595.

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soslovie in 1897, the proportion of women testators in Moscow (1908-1917) (above 40 percent) and an increased proportion of wives and daughters mentioned in wills, however, suggest that in Russia, disproportional wealth distribution was more likely based on social estate membership rather than gender.13_{Likewise, the comparatively low proportion of inheritances}

to GNP14_{was the result of non-egalitarian inheritance strategies, which applied to the majority}

of the Russian, or at least Muscovite, urban population. The Moscow merchantry, and especially the wealthiest merchants, contrary to the rest of the urban population which favoured simple universal inheritance transmission, adopted partible inheritance transmission. Simple universal inheritance transmission, as opposed to egalitarian (partible) divisions of wealth, positively influenced the widening of the gap between people with lower levels of wealth and people with substantial levels of wealth. I suggest that the huge gap in the level of wealth between merchants and meshchane, discussed above, was partly caused by the non-egalitarian inheritance strategies of the majority of the Moscow population (i.e. all except merchants). By transferring all wealth to one successor, other inheritors were free from parental manipulation but also inheritance prospects. Instead, in merchant families, the possibility of receiving a share of inheritance probably decreased the general level of occupational anxiety and also the level of social mobility for male and female.

My study of the inheritance strategies of Moscow merchants is applicable far beyond the immediate context. By studying the merchant guild soslovie and their practices of social, economic, occupational and family reproduction, with a special focus on inheritance transfers, I show that their strategies deviated from the general practices of members of other legal social estates. Studying the Moscow guild merchantry is especially important because this legal social estate (and honorary citizens), which was only 4.2 percent of the Moscow population, held a quarter of real estate and received 45.6 percent of the total value of their net income from privately held Moscow real estate. As a result, my study furthers our understanding of the impact of social stratification and occupational anxieties, which is especially relevant to the effects of early stage industrialisation and moreover, shows how inheritance strategies impacted economic growth and the levels of material inequality in the Russian Empire. Finally, my dissertation offers a valuable case study of Russian private property institutions from the largely underdeveloped perspective of inter-familial, gender-specific transmissions of

13 In the eighteenth century, 22 percent of merchant wills mentioned daughters and 36 percent mentioned wives, compared to 34 and 58 percent in the nineteenth century, respectively.

14 Gross National Product – a monetary measure of all goods and services produced in a given period of time by a countries’ residents, could be applied to estimate the differences in living between nations.

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businesses, real estate, charity donations, marriage, and their influence on macroscale economic development of the Russian Empire.

My dissertation provides the most thorough scholarly attempt at measuring the gap between the average level of wealth along social (and to a lesser extent geographical) lines, in order to explore the mechanisms of wealth management and identify the factors which explain social and economic change in late Imperial Russia. I explore property transfer motivations (through inheritance patterns and patterns of inheritance bequests), combined with previously ignored statistics about the value and the number of transmitted inheritances and gifts inter vivos across social, geographical and chronological lines. Thus, my analysis significantly alters the commonly held view of the Russian population as economically illiterate and bound to explicit or implicit social expectations and profit-averse behaviour. Additionally, my study puts general statements about the consistent increase in the level of personal well-being in late Imperial Russia in real numbers.15

My focus on the personal behaviour and rationality of Moscow testators is grounded in ideas about institutional and behavioural economics. As opposed to classical approaches, I suggest that economic development could be substantially altered by personal understandings of more or less optimal decisions. These decisions, however, were not always more profitable. Within the analytical and conceptual framework of my dissertation, I see that Moscow guild merchant’s (not including their family members) individual decisions were strongly influenced by both social and economic contexts.16_{The idea of Homo Economicus, that individual}

preferences are rational and stable and their decision-making processes are always grounded in profit maximising behaviour where money has no social meaning, is not always applicable. In reality, the merchants and testators in my sample showed features of both rational and irrational behaviour.17_{They could choose to provide children with lifetime, gender-specific}

conditional shares of inheritance while at the same time granting grandchildren unconditional and gender-neutral inheritances.18_{Many testators were}_{emotionally invested and bound by}

social expectations when they drafted a will. Some, however, knowing their successors’

15 See the basic comparisons of income, real wages and equality level in European countries, including the Russian Empire in: Leonard, C. and Ljungberg, J.: ‘Population and Living Standards’.

16 Kahneman, Daniel and Tversky, Amos, ‘Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk’,

Econometrica, 47, 2 (1979), pp. 263–292; Zak, P. J., and Knack, S., ‘Trust and Growth’, Economic Journal, 111 (2001), pp. 295–321.

17 Becker, G. S., The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago, 1976); Weber, M., Roth, G. and Wittich, C., Economy and Society. An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley, 2013).

18 Frederick, S., Loewenstein, G. and O’Donoghue, T., ‘Time Discounting and Time Preference: A Critical Review’, Journal of Economic Literature, 40 (2002), pp. 351–401; Thaler, R. H., and Sunstein, C., Nudge:

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weaknesses (rational behaviour), their lack of motivation, or ability to run the family business imposed conditions on their children’s inheritances or provided successors with shares they deemed manageable based on the individual characteristics.

The methods and concepts of moral and behavioural economy discussed above are not the only methodologies applied in my dissertation. By placing the uncertainty of mercantile agency, wealth accumulation and wealth redistribution at the centre of my research, I employ interdisciplinary methods related to social (family, gender, urban and rural social history and historical demography) and economic history (institutional theory and business history) as well as sociology (social stratification, class and social estates).

Secondary Literature

The Russian guild merchantry has been an object of numerous scholarly studies, which incorporate a variety of aspects of merchant life from professional to cultural practices and their relationship to Russian officialdom. While these aspects of the Imperial Russian merchantry have been explored by Russian and Western scholars, some specific aspects of this history have been largely neglected or ignored (particularly the connection between personal wealth and occupational uncertainty, inheritance transmission and status reproduction). Other studies, while accurate, have never explored the specific issues I examine, such as the effectiveness of the institutional frameworks of mercantile agency and personal property rights.

The negative influences of occupational uncertainty and status anxiety over professional performance among the Russian merchantry has long been established by Richard Pipes and Jo Ann Ruckman.19_{They argue that Russian merchants were substantially limited by the}

oppressive State, whose “institutional weakness” was unable to provide subjects with effective social frameworks.20_{This argument, however, lacks empirical support. To these scholars,}

post-reform Russian society remained a polarised system of “fragmented networks” (the core and periphery) and was “particularistic” and “sedimentary”.21_{All these characteristics were bound}

19 Pipes, R., Russia under the Old Regime (London, 1974), p. 207; Ruckman, J. A., The Moscow Business

Elite. A Social and Cultural Portrait of Two Generations, 1840-1905 (DeKalb, 1984), p. 31.

20 Wirtschafter, E. K., Structures of Society. Imperial Russia's "People of Various Ranks" (DeKalb, 1994), p. 8; Pilbeam, P. M., The Middle Classes in Europe 1789-1914: France, Germany, Italy and Russia (Houndmills, Basingstoke, 1990), pp. 19, 20.

21 Hillmann, Henning and Aven, Brandy L., ‘Fragmented Networks and Entrepreneurship in Late Imperial Russia’, American Journal of Sociology, 117, 2 (2011), pp. 484–538; Wcislo, F. W., Reforming Rural

Russia. State, Local Society, and National Politics, 1855-1914 (Princeton, N.J, 1990); Rieber, A. J., ‘The

Sedimentary Society’, in Clowes, E. W., Kassow, S. D. and West, J. L. (ed.), Between Tsar and People.

Educated society and the quest for public identity in late imperial Russia, Princeton, 1991, pp. 343–366;

Mironov, B. N., Sotsialnaia istoriia Rossii perioda imperii (XVIII-nachalo XX v.): Genezis lichnosti,

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to the idea of a society plagued by instability as a result of the huge variations of attitudes across geographic, demographic, ethnical and cultural issues.22

Other scholars have challenged the argument that “traditional images of Imperial Russia […] convey a society of rigid, stagnant, and hierarchical relationships”.23_{In their view, Russian}

society was very mobile and open to change, where the boundaries between social groups were flexible (and even “indeterminate”) and society absorbed “multiple structures”.24_{Despite their}

important contribution, these academics are likewise rarely able to support their arguments with empirical data on, for example, the rates of social and occupational mobility.

Moscow guild merchant social mobility, rates of intergenerational business transfer and demographic reproduction have only been examined in the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century. The later period is largely overlooked. One exception are the numerous qualitative and quantitative studies about a group of Siberian guild merchants in the second half of the nineteenth century.25_{Scholars researched the Siberian merchantry by applying}

methods of record linkage: their findings suggest that the annual rate of merchant soslovie mobility was between 5-10 percent of the total number of members. By the third generation, 20 percent of merchant family businesses survived. These academics likewise suggested that the trend and rates of demographic and occupational evolution of merchant soslovie, with subtle variations, were also shared by merchants throughout all the Russian provinces.26_Until

recently, however, academics have not compared these findings with data on the Central

22 Wcislo, Reforming Rural Russia, p. 5.

23 Wirtschafter, Social identity; Burbank, J., Hagen, M. von and Remnev, A. V., Russian Empire. Space,

People, Power, 1700-1930 (Bloomington, 2007); Hartley, J. M., A Social History of the Russian empire 1650-1825 (London, New York, 1999); Abbot, C., ‘The terms of Russian Social History’, in Clowes, E.

W., Kassow, S. D. and West, J. L. (ed.), Between Tsar and People. Educated society and the quest for

public identity in late imperial Russia, Princeton, 1991, pp. 15–27; Kassow, S. D., ‘Russia's Unrealized

Civil Society’, in Clowes, E. W., Kassow, S. D. and West, J. L. (ed.), Between Tsar and People. Educated

society and the quest for public identity in late imperial Russia, Princeton, 1991, pp. 367–374; Freeze:

‘Soslovie Paradigm’; Smith, A. K., ‘Honored Citizens and the Creation of a Middle Class in Imperial Russia’, Slavic Review, 76, 2 (2017), pp. 327–349; Smith, A. K., For the Common Good and their Own

Well-Being. Social Estates in Imperial Russia (Oxford, 2014).

24 Wirtschafter, Structures of Society, p. xi.

25 Aksenov, A. I., Genealogiia moskovskogo kupechestva XVIII v. Iz istorii formirovaniia russkoi burzhuazii (Moskva, 1988); Fomina, O. V., Imushchestvenno-demograficheskaia kharakteristika moskovskoi

kupecheskoi semi poslednei treti XVIII veka. (Moskva, 2003); Avdeev, A., Troitskaia, I. and Ulianova., G.,

‘Soslovnye razlichiia v domokhoziaistv v XIX veke: Moskva i ee okrestnosti’, Demograficheskoe

obozrenie, 2, 2 (2015), pp. 74–91; Goncharov, Iu. M., Kupecheskaia semia vtoroi poloviny XIX- nachala XX vv. po materialam kompiuternoi bazy dannykh kupecheskikh semei Zapadnoi Sibiri (Moskva, 2002);

Startsev, A. V., Goncharov, Iu. M., Istoriia predprinimatelstva v Sibiri (XVII - nachalo XX v.). Uchebnoe

posobie // XVII -nachalo XX v. uchebnoe posobie (Barnaul, 1999); Boiko, V. P., Kupechestvo Zapadnoi Sibiri konets XVIII - XIX vek. Ocherki sotsialnoi, otraslevoi i mentalnoi istoriii (Tomsk, 2009); Boiko,

V.P., Tomskoe kupechestvo v kontse XVIII-XIX vv. Iz istorii formirovaniia sibirskoi burzhuazii. (Tomsk, 1996).

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provinces in order to prove or disprove the assertions made by Siberian scholars. I suggest that the general lack of research interest is partly due to time consuming methodologies (in late Imperial Russia merchants in all Siberian provinces were only a tenth of the size of the Moscow guild merchant population). Similarly, more scholars appear interested in Moscow and Saint Petersburg when discussing social and national composition, political ambitions, charity, gender, etc.27

The flexible and porous structure of the Russian business community has affected the parameters of research objectives in the work of many Russian and Western scholars. For example, Yuri A. Petrov, the author of the most complex and thorough research about Moscow merchants and entrepreneurs at the beginning of the twentieth century, defined his research subject as “partly based on Soviet tradition ... and partly on traditions of Western historiography”. He similarly described merchants as “bourgeoisie,” which, for him, was a “general term for all entrepreneurial layers of society”.28_{How these entrepreneurial layers,}

proportionally and conceptually, intersect with the guild merchantry, however, is not specified. The issues he confronted, and his sources show that the term “bourgeoisie” only applied to the wealthiest business elite (with wealth over 100,000 roubles) and Moscow citizens who, based on the 1909 national survey, were eligible to pay income tax (around 70,000 people with annual incomes over 1,000 roubles).

Theoretical reflections about the concept of the Russian bourgeoisie, middle class and the evolution of society from estate to class structures lie outside the main focus of my dissertation, as mentioned above. Yet, a general overview of works by both Western and Russian scholars suggests that there is still little common understanding of what the Russian business community looked like in terms of numbers, structure, productive relations, social identity, and personal

27 For example, see Owen, T. C., Capitalism and Politics in Russia. A Social History of the Moscow

Merchants, 1855-1905 (Cambridge, New York, 1981); Baryshnikov, M.N., Politika i predprinimatelstvo v Rossii. (Iz istorii vzaimodeistviia v nachale XX veka) (SPb, 1997); Osmanov, A. I., Peterburgskoe kupechestvo v poslednei chetverti XVIII - nachale XX veka (S.-Peterburg, 2005); Shatsillo, M. K., Sotsialnyi sostav Rossiiskoi burzhuazii kontsa XIX veka (Moskva, 2004); Gavlin, M. L., Formirovanie krupnoi moskovskoi burzhuazii vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka (60-e - 90-e gody) (Moskva, 1973); Ananich,

B.V., Dalmann, D., Petrov, Iu.A., Chastnoe predprinimatelstvo v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii:

etnokonfessionalnaia struktura i regionalnoe razvitie, XIX - nachalo XX vv. (Moskva, 2010); Sushchenko,

V. A., Predprinimatelstvo na trekh etapakh rossiiskoi modernizatsii (vtoraia polovina - nachalo v.):

obshchee i osobennoe v istoricheskoi sudbe (Rostov-na-Donu, 2011); Ulianova, G. N., Female Entrepreneurs in Nineteenth-Century Russia, vol. 2 (London, Brookfield, 2009); Ulianova, G. N., ‘Old

Believers and New Entrepreneurs’, in James L. West & Iurii Petrov (ed.), Merchant Moscow: Images of

Russia’s Vanished Bourgeoisie, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007, pp. 61–71; Ulianova, G. N., Blagotvoritelnost moskovskikh predprinimatelei. 1860-1914; Slovar kuptsov-blagotvoritelei. Chelovek v kulture (Moskva, 2014).

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and material well-being.29_{Views on the subject vary. Pamela Pilbeam questions the existence}

of the middle class in late Imperial Russia. She describes it as a very underdeveloped, fragmentary, proto-middle class because, in her view, the middle class is a product of industrial development and Russia began industrialising very late. Even before 1917 the Russian situation differed from the Central and Western European pattern so dramatically that the author concludes that “The Russian middle class did not exist because its constituent elements were determined to avoid fusion and identification”.30

C. Timberlake alternatively claims that “by the end of the nineteenth century the industrialization and... division of labour had produced in Russia middle-class groups that performed the same functions as their counterparts in Western Europe … [yet the middle classes were largely invisible because] the government’s aim was to co-opt the new elites into traditional positions of privilege rooted in the society of orders”.31_{Between these two extremes,}

E. Wirtschafter suggests more subtle, country-specific definitions of the middle class that illuminates both similarities and differences.32_{With few exceptions, the historiography of}

Russian, especially urban, society in the late Imperial period describes a bleak existence of lost opportunities and unrealised expectations.33

Occasional attempts to estimate the size of the middle class rely on income estimations of wealthy voters, national surveys of income distribution among the wealthiest strata of the population (B. Mironov) or calculations of the proportion of the population with suitable intellectual, industrial or commercial backgrounds. Pilbeam estimated that the proportion of the middle class in Russia at the beginning of the nineteenth century was 2 percent, growing to 10 percent by the end of the century.34_{Boris Mironov based his calculations on income based}

29 Unfortunately, Russian historiography does not have the same number of edited volumes published about the European middle class, which provide both theoretical reflections and specific evidence. Crossick, G. and Haupt, H.-G., The Petite Bourgeoisie in Europe, 1780-1914. Enterprise, Family and Independence (London, 1995); Kocka, J. and Mitchell, A., Bourgeois Society in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Oxford, Providence, 1993); Blackbourn, D. and Evans, R. J., The German Bourgeoisie. Essays on the Social

History of the German Middle Class from the Late Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Century (London,

1991); Cassis, Y., Big Business. The European Experience in the twentieth century (Oxford, 2004). 30 Pilbeam, Middle Classes, pp. 18, 68, 80, 135.

31 Timberlake, C. E., ‘The Middle Classes in Tsarist Russia’, in Bush, M. L. (ed.), Social Orders and Social

Classes in Europe since 1500. Studies in Social Stratification, First issued in hardback, London, 2016, pp.

86–113.

32 Wirtschafter, Structures of Society; Wirtschafter, E. K., ‘The Groups Between: Raznochintsy, Intelligentsia, Professionals’, in Lieven, D. (ed.), The Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 2, Cambridge [etc.], 2006, pp. 245–263; Timberlake: ‘Middle Classes’, p. 86.

33 For example, West, J. L. and Petrov, Y. A., Merchant Moscow. Images of Russia's vanished bourgeoisie (Princeton, N.J., ©1998); Bill, V. T., The Forgotten Class. The Russian Bourgeoisie from the Earliest

Beginnings to 1900 (Westport, Conn., 1976); Kassow: ‘Russia's Unrealized Civil Society’.

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characteristics of middle class membership, and estimated that at the end of the long nineteenth century, the middle class was 5.5 percent of the Russian population.35

Almost every scholar who has investigated the problems of the merchant soslovie, the social stratification of the business elite, or any question related to wealth, income and living standards in Russia, remark on their inability to provide any direct estimations of wealth or income prior to 1900.36_{While the value of the personal wealth and income of the urban}

population before 1900 is difficult to evaluate and compare with other countries, the available data on workers’ wages in agriculture allow for general comparisons. To place Russian income inequality in the context of world-wide trends (in 1870, 1890 and 1913), C. Leonard and J. Ljungberg utilised data on agricultural worker wages which, for an agrarian country such as Russia, seems representative of calculations prior to the last decade of the long nineteenth century. After 1913, when the pace of industrial development was higher, these results are probably biased and less accurate but still the only sources available.37

Sources

Archival sources on Moscow guild merchant social and demographic statistics, as well as last wills, probations and wardship cases for the second half of the nineteenth century, are preserved in the Central Historical Archive of Moscow (TsGA Moskvy OKhD do 1917). Statistics on the value and number of transmitted inheritances and gifts inter vivos are preserved in the Russian State Historical Archive in Saint Petersburg (RGIA). I also consulted supplementary sources at the Manuscript Department of the State Historical Museum in Moscow (OPI GIM) and at the Manuscript Department of the Russian State Library (OR RGB). This dissertation is based on a variety of sources: sources on the evolution of the business demography of the Russian business community (Moscow guild merchantry membership books both published and unpublished for the years 1863, 1879, 1880, 1881,1897 and 1910), official statistics of the number of merchants and business-related individuals, bankruptcy statistics (1885-1898), archival registers of guild merchant families and other materials and documents of this nature. In total, I have accessed more than 12,000 personal profiles of Moscow merchants who were actively involved in business from the first quarter of the nineteenth century until 1917.

35 Mironov, Sotsialnaia istoriia Rossii, pp. 142–143.

36 Mironov: ‘Kakaia doroga vedet k revoliutsii’, p. 101; Petrov, Moskovskaia burzhuaziia, p. 60; Startsev, A. V., Goncharov, Iu. M., Istoriia predprinimatelstva Sibiri, p. 131; Bovykin, V.I., Zarozhdenie finansovogo

kapitala v Rossii (Moscow, 1967), p. 290; Nafziger and Lindert: ‘Russian Inequality’, p. 769.

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I also incorporated sources which provide information on the demography (life expectancy) of Russian merchants, changes in their family size and structure and the personal life cycles of individual Moscow guild merchants in the second half of the nineteenth century. This data was collected from the unpublished merchant soslovie registry books which contain sections on deceased members of the soslovie and indicate members who left the soslovie. This allows me to calculate the average life expectancy of the members of the merchant soslovie and compare this information with national data on life expectancy. Such comparisons allow me to investigate whether or when the connection between wealth, occupation and gender appeared in Russia, and Moscow specifically. The same unpublished registers, contrary to the published versions which provide only the names and age of male family members, contain information about all individuals enrolled on a merchant’s patent, including family members, their age and kin relation. The data on the lifetime of Moscow merchants and members of their families was collected from the prosopographical appendix in Galina N. Ulianova’s manuscript on wealthy Moscow merchant philanthropists.38

The data gathered from sources described above was standardised at the time and did not change in internal structure for the whole period under investigation. This implies the accuracy and authenticity of the information.39_{The sample of prosopographical data for Moscow guild}

merchantry and their family members was collected in 1879 and 1897. The proportion of members who died and left the guild was about 10 percent of the average annual number of certificate holders. The number of merchants’ relatives enrolled on the certificates, and used for calculations of family size, life cycle and other parameters, is about 6,500 people in total over several years between 1863 and 1912. The total number of members in the Moscow merchant soslovie (including family members) was around 23,000. While it may appear that the 6,500 relatives in my sample in 1897 is not large enough to be representative, it is the biggest sample on this topic ever collected and analysed. I suggest that the sample is appropriately sized to draw some connections, or lack thereof, between occupation (here gender-specific membership in merchant soslovie) and factors which shaped personal material well-being. My hypothesis is as follows: if the average longevity of a business and the average age of the members of merchant guilds increased, while the number of family members decreased (i.e. the number of inheritors decreased) it implies that inheritance shares would be larger. Similarly, they would become more gender and asset neutral in that both sons and

38 Ulianova, Blagotvoritelnost moskovskikh predprinimatelei. 39 For a further discussion of source limitations, see Chapter 1.

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daughters were likely to receive, for example, real estate. If this hypothesis is correct, it suggests better living standards for generations of children compared to their parents.

Another collection of sources relates to questions of wealth composition and transmission. This collection consists of published and unpublished last wills, inheritance probations, Muscovite wardships (with a primary focus on the guild merchantry, and, for the post-1898 period, merchants and entrepreneurs), supplemented by published and unpublished statistics of the value and number of transmitted inheritances and gifts inter vivos across the Russian Empire. The chronology of sources in this collection covers a more extended period, from the eighteenth century until 1917, in order to examine shifts in Moscow guild merchant inheritance strategies. In total, I was able to access 419 wardships, inheritance transmission cases and drafted wills where personal wealth was valued. The sample of sources in this collection was randomly collected. It is difficult to say with certainty whether or not the files were randomly preserved. For example, in the Moscow Historical Archive I found files of only two Moscow notaries (in 1908 in Moscow there were 26 notaries registered and 33 in 1917).40_{The wills in}

the notary files (notary registers) were collected chronologically and drafted by people of differing social and material backgrounds, which likely implies random preservation. At the same time, it is unclear if the separate cases of inheritance probations that have survived were entirely random or not.

The court reform of 1864 (apart from its well-known improvements such as trial by jury, public hearings and professional advocates) introduced a unified judicial system across the majority of the Russian Empire. The probation of last wills was also unified and codified, including similar procedures and composition of documents required for probation and inheritance acceptance by successors. From 1864 until 1917, all cases of inheritance succession were under the jurisdiction of the District Courts. Records of probated cases had to be stored at the District Court Archive which, unfortunately was always the case.

It should to be explained that while the 1864 Court Reform unified and improved the judicial system of the Russian Empire, the issue of archival preservation has received less attention. Although the law dictated that the District Courts (where all last wills had to be probated) were required to keep records after the closure of a case, in reality, a substantial number of cases found their way to different institutions (different courts, banks, notary offices, charity organisations etc.) which were connected to the probate process. Legally, there were two types

40 Vsia Moskva. Adresnaia i spravochnaia kniga na 1917 god 24-i god izdaniia (46-i god izdaniia

"Adres-kalendaria" g. Moskvy, izd. Mosk. Gor. Upravoi). (Moskva, 1917); Vsia Moskva. Adresnaia i spravochnaia kniga na 1908 god 15-i god izdaniia. (37-i god izdaniia) (Moskva, 1908).

Overcoming uncertainty : Moscow merchants’ wealth and inheritance in the second half of the nineteenth century

Overcoming uncertainty:

Moscow merchants’ wealth and inheritance in

the second half of the nineteenth century.

Olga Pavlenko

European University Institute

Department of History and Civilization

Overcoming uncertainty:

Moscow merchants’ wealth and inheritance in the second half of the

nineteenth century.

Olga Pavlenko

Table of Contents

List of abbreviations

List of Tables

List of Figures

List of Tables in Appendix

Introduction